Torture Inside a Secret Israeli Concentration Camp

Aug 14, 2024

Israel’s Channel 12 recently broadcast disturbing footage from Sde Teiman, a secret Israeli detention center that many have likened to a concentration camp, where prisoners are being tortured. Israel has held hundreds of Palestinian prisoners at the center since October 2023, and the footage shows dozens of Palestinian men lying face down on the ground while Israeli soldiers pick one out and lead him to an area where they appear to sexually violate him.

It is thought that this footage corroborates recent allegations of a gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman. The suspected perpetrators of that attack have been placed under house arrest. In July the Israel-based human rights group B’Tselem documented widespread torture and rape at the facility in a damning report called “Welcome to Hell.”

While U.S. news media extensively covered alleged sexual abuses by Hamas forces on Oct. 7, 2023, with scant evidence, there has been far less coverage of the documented sexual abuse and torture of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers.

Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights and U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about Israel’s ongoing project of genocide.

Sonali Kolhatkar joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.